“He is the father, we are the children,” said Joseph Haydn, commenting on works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Paralleling world celebrations of C. P. E. Bach’s three-hundredth birth anniversary, the Cairo Symphony Chamber Orchestra will present a concert with works by the composer as part of the “Composers’ Jubilee” series.

The concert will take place on Saturday, 22 November 2014 at the Main Hall of the Cairo Opera House and will include three compositions by the second son of Johann Sebastian Bach: Symphony no.1 in D Major, Concerto for Flute in D minor with Peter Olah as soloist, and a Magnificat featuring vocal soloists soprano Iman Mostafa, alto Amina Khairat, tenor Hisham El-Gindy and baritone Raouf Zaidan. A Cappella choir, with choir master Maya Gvineria, will also participate.

The Cairo Symphony Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Nader Abbassi, is a newly formed ensemble consisting of Cairo Symphony Orchestra musicians. As a smaller formation, the chamber orchestra will give several concerts including compositions by C. P. E. Bach during this season.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach represents a transition between the Baroque music period and the following classical period. Throughout 2014, he has been celebrated across the world, particularly in German cities where the composer spent most of his life.

It’s not very often that one receives international recognition two hundred fifty years after being placed in the ground. But with help from University of Wisconsin-Madison musicology professor Charles Dill and a host of international scholars and musicians, that’s exactly what’s happening for Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Rameau, a French composer (1683-1764) who lived during the reign of Louis XV, has become famous for his contributions to music theory, his early harpsichord works, and especially his operas. His 1722 Treatise on Harmonyis considered revolutionary for having incorporated philosophical ideas alongside practical musical issues. His operas were equally famous for their rich choral singing and elegant dancing. In the last few decades, interest in Rameau has intensified, with French scholars leading the way and organizing major festivals in Europe. Because of Dill’s renown as a scholar of Rameau and the Baroque, the UW-Madison School of Music will present a series of performances and talks about Rameau during the 2014-2015 academic year.

On 13 November 2014, the first of these events will kick off with a discussion about the expressive qualities in Rameau’s music (with visiting opera director David Ronis and Professor Anne Vila of the Department of French and Italian), followed by a concert the next day featuring Marc Vallon, UW-Madison professor of bassoon, in a mostly-Rameau concert. You can read the full schedule of events here.

We asked Prof. Dill to tell us a bit about himself and what makes Rameau an important figure in music.

University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) How did you first become interested in Rameau?

Charles Dill (CD) Modern audiences often view all composers of the past as struggling visionaries. This may be true of composers after Beethoven, but it isn’t true – or isn’t true in the same way – for earlier composers, even composers like Mozart or Haydn. They considered themselves to be working at a job. They wrote pieces to suit their performers, and the compositions were “disposable.” If something needed changing, the composer changed it, generally without much grumbling. They didn’t continue to garner attention for decades.

What first interested me about Rameau, then, was that he revised his operas extensively and these revised versions continued to be performed. This suggests all sorts of remarkable things about him and his works. Notably, he was alert to how audiences responded to his works to an unusual degree, and he felt some kind of obligation toward “getting the work right,” as it were. That’s a very modern way of thinking about music. Because of this attitude, he also took risks as a composer. He was a remarkably creative individual, and he was rewarded for it. His works dominated French opera for a period of fifty years, until well after his death. For his time and place, this truly was an unusual relationship between composer and audience.

Add to that Rameau’s work as a theorist. Thinkers had been speculating about how music works for as long as music had existed, but Rameau was the first to envision a comprehensive system that accounted for all of its aspects: how keys or tonalities come into being, why some harmonic progressions are more effective than others, how musical knowledge influences performance. We still employ his basic terminology for describing fundamental principles of music – chord inversion, tonic, dominant. There were flaws in his ideas, to be sure, and there have been countless other systems proposed since that make similar claims, but if you imagine music as an organized, coherent system – something we do every day – then you are, to a degree, following in his footsteps.

CD I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. When I began working in Parisian libraries in the late 1980s, as a graduate student completing my degree, there were only a handful of people studying Rameau. Students from that generation have done influential work. Thomas Christensen explained the development of Rameau’s music theory, Sylvie Bouissou became the general editor of the Rameau edition, and William Christie specialized in interpreting Rameau’s music in performance.

I was interested in Rameau’s relationship with audiences. Music criticism was still a fledgling enterprise in the eighteenth century, and yet his compositions elicited strong opinions, both for and against. He was one of the first composers to be treated not simply as a commodity, but as a public figure, one of the first to take that role seriously. To an unusual degree, he felt the need to experiment in his compositions, and yet he was also forced by circumstances to consider listeners and their perceptions in everything he wrote. After all this time, I still find this story remarkable.

Times have changed. Nowadays, France recognizes Rameau as one its most representative composers and devotes time, money, and effort to developing our knowledge of him. A small army of dedicated French researchers is poring over every available source and producing first-rate scholarship. They’re doing wonderful work.

UWM What contributions have you made to scholarship?

CD When I began writing about Rameau, there was a longstanding trend to approach composers solely from the vantage point of what they wrote. We could describe this as the “great composers” or “great works” approach. Discussing composers in this way cuts out some of the most interesting material: what audiences believed, how they liked what they heard, how they received the composers, and how composers responded to criticism. My book, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (1998), which Princeton University Press has recently reprinted as part of its Legacy series, addressed some of these questions. As an eminently public figure, Rameau was subject to intense scrutiny. Some critics distrusted opera as an overly sensual medium, and some regarded Rameau’s colorful music as an especially egregious example. Rameau encouraged these kinds of responses. Where earlier composers generally wrote simple, unobtrusive music, Rameau wrote music that demanded attention. In a way, then, he challenged critics and audience members to define their expectations regarding music openly and publicly. It is telling that, during the period in which he became popular, audiences changed, coming to resemble modern audiences more and more: they began to learn difficult and complex music by heart, they grew more quiet and became more attentive during performances.

My other contributions have had to do with aspects of his career. My early publications often dealt with the relationship between Rameau’s ideas as a music theorist and his actual compositions. Having an eighteenth-century composer who was so active on both fronts is truly unusual, and it allows us to think more carefully about the relationship between theory and practice. More recently, I’ve been interested in reconstructing Rameau’s intellectual life. He was a bit of a magpie, really, taking ideas from the writers and philosophers who most suited his needs, but given the time and place in which he lived, he could take from the best: Descartes and Malebranche were early sources of inspiration, but eventually, like so many of his contemporaries, he turned his attention to Locke. Among those who collaborated with him on projects were Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert. So I’ve been developing a clearer sense of what he himself actually believed, based on what he drew on from these various sources.”

UWM How does Rameau fit in with other well-known composers of the day?

CD Rameau was two years older than Handel and Bach, almost an exact contemporary. Interestingly, although there’s no evidence to suggest he knew their music well, he helped popularize in France the kinds of music they were writing. From the Handel side of things, he took the kind of virtuosic playing and singing we associate with Italian composition, and from the Bach side, he took an interest in complex counterpuntal and harmonic language. To these he added an extraordinary sense of color – few at this time were combining orchestras and voices in such surprising ways – and an endless gift for invention comparable to Bach’s and Handel’s. During the late 1740s, a faction arose at the French court that wanted to set limits on how many operas Rameau could compose, because they felt he was dominating the music scene so completely.

Rameau was well known internationally. Initially, this was the result of his theoretical ideas, which he began publishing in the 1720s; reviews appeared almost immediately in Germany. By the 1750s, when his theoretical ideas were being popularized, his work was receiving attention in Italy as well. He also became an international figure musically in this period. His works were performed in Italy and Germany, and they were influential among the reform composers of that generation – Traetta, Jommelli, and Gluck. (For example, the famous opening scene of Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice, which begins in the midst of a funeral procession, was directly modeled on the beginning of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux.)

UWM What activities have taken place around the world this year, and where?

CD Well, as is always the case with composers, there have been performances around the world – in France and, more generally, Europe, obviously, but in the states as well, notably in New York and Washington, D. C. In fact, a phone app has circulated in France so that one can follow where Rameau is being performed every day this year.

Raphaëlle Legrand, who teaches at the Sorbonne, has put together a fascinating year-long series of presentations, open to the public, that combine historians, music theorists, professional musicians specializing in period instruments, and professional dancers specializing in historical dance techniques. This project is called the “Atelier Rameau” and it has an excellent website. It has been especially interesting to have singers, instrumentalists, and dancers working together, because dance is so basic to Rameau’s musical style. Performers quickly developed a new sense of what was and wasn’t possible when they began talking to each other!

Among the surprises, those in attendance learned that we are still discovering eighteenth-century production scores for Rameau’s earliest and most important works, and that Rameau was the composer of the famous round, Frère Jacques, which he included in a recently discovered composition manual. I can honestly say that this past year has advanced our knowledge of Rameau and his music in unprecedented ways.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788)
The famous brother, Emanuel “wrote the book” on keyboard playing and distinguished himself as an inspired improviser. All the great Classical masters acknowledged their debt to him. Never at a loss for a musical idea and a host of ways to express it, he created a body of works for keyboard rivaled only by Haydn’s for imagination and craft, yet many of today’s pianists are scarcely aware of his work.

Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784)
The eldest brother, Friedemann struggled to find stability in his life yet amassed a respectable record of professional achievement as an organist and composer.

Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782)
The rebellious brother, Christian left Germany, mastered the idioms of Italian opera, traded Lutheranism for Catholicism, and climbed to the apex of London musical society as the Queen’s music master, yet he left a widow in penury.

Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach (1732-1795)
The quiet brother, Christoph Friedrich settled into service at the small court of Bückeburg and spent his days composing in the fashionable genres and styles.

AMERICAN BACH SOLOISTS FESTIVAL San Francisco, 11-20 July 2014. Held at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the lineup this year features music by composers who influenced Bach, including Vivaldi, Pergolesi and Buxtehude; highlights of other programs are Handel’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato and Bach’s Mass in B minor (BWV 232).

CARMEL BACH FESTIVAL Carmel-by-the-Sea, Monterey, Pebble Beach and Salinas, 19 July through 2 August 2014. Bach naturally figures prominently here. On opening night his Magnificat (BWV 243) and Vivaldi’s Gloria (reflecting this year’s Italian theme) will be programed alongside a work commissioned from the young Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw.

MASSACHUSETTS

ASTON MAGNA Great Barrington and Waltham, and Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 19 June through 19 July 2014. This early-music festival offers period-instrument programs including a celebration of C. P. E Bach’s three-hundredth birthday and a concert featuring Italian trio sonatas and a new work by Nico Muhly.

BERKSHIRE CHORAL FESTIVAL Sheffield, 13 July through 3 August 2014. This festival is proof that amateur choral singing continues to thrive, as eager singers arrive from around the country for an intense period of study and performances. Their efforts will culminate in performances led by professional musicians of Brahms’s Requiem, Bach’s St. John Passion (BWV 245) and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.

ROCKPORT CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Cape Ann, 6 June through 13 July 2014. An estimable roster of musicians will play here, including the Emerson and Borromeo String Quartets. Jeremy Denk will perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) and Ives’s Concord Sonata. The lineup also features a concert for clarinet and marimba and performances by Chanticleer and the Imani Winds.

MICHIGAN

GREAT LAKES CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Detroit, 14-29 June 2014. Bach is in the spotlight this year and the pianist James Tocco has programed an appealing array of repertory favorites and contemporary works. The pianist Frederic Chiu will juxtapose music by Bach and Philip Glass and the cellist Paul Watkins, the festival’s artistic director designate, will join Mr. Tocco for Brahms’s Sonata for Piano and Cello no. 1.

NEW MEXICO

SANTA FE CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL Santa Fe and Albuquerque, 20 July through 25 August 2014. The pianist Yefim Bronfman is artist in residence at this festival, nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. He will play a solo recital of Prokofiev and Marc Neikrug; other highlights include a Bach series; new works by Lowell Liebermann and Brett Dean; and performances by Alessio Bax, Ran Dank and Sasha Cooke.

NEW YORK

BRIDGEHAMPTON CHAMBER MUSIC FESTIVAL 30 July through 24 August 2014. Concerts in various spots in Long Island’s East End include piano quartets by Brahms, Dvořák and Schumann; a premiere by Howard Shore; recent works by Kevin Puts, Gabriel Kahane and Evan Ziporyn; and Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor (BWV 1043). Performers include Brooklyn Rider and the pianists Gilles Vonsattel, Shai Wosner and Joyce Yang.

CHELSEA MUSIC FESTIVAL New York City, 6-14 June 2014. The German-Brazilian theme this year is inspired by the anniversaries of Richard Strauss, Villa-Lobos and C. P. E. Bach. The multigenre concerts, held at various galleries and institutes and often intertwined with visual and culinary themes, feature ensembles including the Sirius Quartet and premieres by composers including Augusta Read Thomas.

OHIO

CHAMBERFEST CLEVELAND Cleveland, 19-29 June 2014. It’s never too early to celebrate an anniversary: This festival toasts its third birthday with a spotlight on music for trios, with works by Haydn, Kodály, Schumann, Beethoven, Kevin Puts and Paul Schoenfield, as well as an arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for string trio. Also on the lineup is a new take on Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera.

OREGON

CHAMBER MUSIC NORTHWEST Portland, 23 June through 27 July 2014. David Shifrin, the clarinetist and artistic director, has programmed a wide range of repertory, including Mozart’s Quintet in A Major, for which he will join the Emerson Quartet. The lineup also includes the premiere of Stephen Hartke’s piano sonata for four hands by Anna Polonsky and Orion Weiss; Sasha Cooke singing Mozart, Bach and Schubert; and music by David del Tredici and Osvaldo Golijov.

OREGON BACH FESTIVAL Portland, Bend, Ashland, Corvallis, Florence and Eugene, 26 June through 13 July 2014. Matthew Halls, who succeeds Helmuth Rilling as artistic director, commemorates his debut season with the Monteverdi Vespers; Bach’s St. Mark Passion (BWV 247); a solo recital by the pianist Gabriela Montero; a performance by the organist Paul Jacobs; and Monica Huggett leading the Portland Baroque Orchestra. Mr. Rilling returns to conduct Mozart’s Requiem and Symphony no. 40.

WASHINGTON

SEATTLE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY 7 July through 2 August 2014. The violinist James Ehnes is the music director here. Programming features a strong roster of musicians – including Augustin Hadelich, Richard O’Neill, Edward Arron, Inon Barnatan and Anthony McGill – performing music by Bach, Beethoven, Bartók, Derek Bermel and David Lang.

Hagia Eirene (St. Irene Church) stands on what is believed to be the oldest site of Christian worship in Istanbul. Roman Emperor Constantine I ordered the church in the fourth century, making it the first church built in Constantinople, and it is also the only church that was not turned into a mosque after the Ottomans conquered Istanbul in 1453. Eventually the Topkapi Palace walls enclosed the church, and the building was pressed into service as an armory and booty warehouse.

In the early twentieth century, the former church was transformed into a military museum, and now, under the control of the Turkish Ministry of Culture, the church’s original atrium, an apse containing five rows of built-in seats, and a great cross outlined in black against a gold background in the half-dome above the apse combine to create an extraordinary atmosphere for performances of western art music.

To deconstruct the genius of Bach, to fathom how the cold math of line plotted against line, note riding against note, voices knitted into voices, can translate into sounds often held up as the very pinnacle of Western music, to explain the whole history of a composer who the history books insist “invented” musical grammar but whose reputation evaporated from view for a hundred years after his death in 1750 – the name “Bach” meaning a famous teacher and organist to most people living in the early 1800s – to view Bach not through the prism of our twenty-first century minds, where we might mistakenly assume that the lifestyle, function and expectations of a composer were the same as today, but to place Bach in the right historical context, could take some kind of genius in itself.

Or perhaps not. Wrapped up in the mystery of Johann Sebastian Bach is his very familiarity. Once you’ve internalized the lessons of harmony and counterpoint that Bach formalized in the near-200 chorale harmonizations he wrote throughout his life and in works like the The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93) – the so-called forty-eight; two books each made up from a prelude and fugue in all twenty-four major and minor keys – practically every note he composed can be slotted neatly into his rational and consistent system. Familiarity is bred from an early age. Every night my two- year old son goes to bed, his music-box offers two choices: sounds of nature or Bach, the inference being that at some deep human level they have become interchangeable. And if, one day, my son goes to music college, those same Bachian principles of harmony and counterpoint will be hardwired into his consciousness like, at primary school, the alphabet, or the reliable simplicity that one plus one is always going to equal two.

Theoretically interpreting and making sense of Bach ought to be as straightforward and user-friendly as assembling an IKEA bookcase: begin with the component parts, follow the manual, and you can’t go far wrong. And a door opens on perhaps Bach’s most profound enigma. Musicians can actively hear the harmonic processes of Bach clearly and unambiguously functioning in front of their ears – unlike Haydn, Beethoven or Bruckner there are no blots from the blue. These harmonic patterns are deeply woven inside our cultural DNA. Where would the Scherzo from Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, The Kinks’ Village Green, the forward-thinking jazz of Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano, or The Beach Boys’ Lady Lynda have been without Bach? And yet it’s entirely possible to play all the notes devotedly and still get the music wrong. There’s a part of Bach we can’t have. One plus one might always make two, but Bach’s music is interested in the mysteries of why.

The leading British conductor and Bach scholar Christopher Hogwood, who in 1973 founded the Academy of Ancient Music with its mission to play Baroque music on period instruments, tells me that he’s puzzled by students coming his way who, for instance, play minuets every day of their lives without knowing how to dance a minuet. “That doesn’t mean they don’t play a charming minuet,” he says, “but trying to make sense of Bach without knowing what was in his world is a compromise. I understand that students who practice their instruments for eight hours a day are unlikely to want to go to the library to learn about eighteenth century theology. But there’s no point in playing a chorale prelude without knowing the chorale. And if you know the chorale you might as well know the words that were sung to the chorale; and then you might as well know a little bit about eighteenth-century theology, Lutherism and Calvinism, and you’ll be a little closer to what was in Bach’s world.”

And Hogwood is keen to press another distinction about the distance between then and now which knocks back on the sort of compositional material Bach generated and worked with. Interpreters take note. “All music then was contemporary music,” he explains. “You wrote to be played tomorrow and you forgot about it the day after. It was very immediate and if there was no performance, or the opportunity suddenly collapsed, you simply stopped writing. People didn’t want to hear something that was a year old, certainly not ten years old, and never a century old. Composers were workers, employed on the same terms as the cook, or the coachman, or the gardener. You didn’t always require to know the name of the gardener, but if you became a well-known gardener people might come to look at your garden in the same way people came to Venice to hear Vivaldi. But very few people came to hear Bach. He never got a top job and was isolated – and knew it.”

Hogwood talks about the pressure on Bach to crank out a fresh cantata every Sunday. And with his wife and sons lined up to copy parts and fill out Bach’s harmonies – applying those forever internally consistent harmonic procedures – the sheer industry of his art becomes clear. The bottom drawer was regularly and unapologetically plundered. Up against an impossible deadline? The Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major(BWV 1048), with added chorus, becomes that Sunday’s cantata. (“You don’t have any sense that a chorus is ‘missing’,” Hogwood muses, “but Bach certainly had a sense that one could be added.”) Practicality, recycling, the brutal craft of needing to have his cantata ready each Sunday was everything.

Which means Bach needed his material to be bulletproof; self-generative processes, like canons and fugues, once triggered, had to slot together and move forward with the architectural logic of a subway map. No time for unpicking, correcting or finessing. Bach was a servant writing music for the greater glory of God. Move forwards a century and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis is a dialogue with the divine, albeit an essentially God-fearing one. Beethoven’s great works – the Symphony no. 5 in C minor, the Violin Concerto in D Major, his Opus 111 Piano Sonata in C minor – are dialogues with a world that has Beethoven and his obsessions at its center. The techniques of harmony and counterpoint he inherited from Bach are re-sculpted, re-constituted, thought through afresh. Each piece requires a new solution, part musical and part philosophical, that could not be turned around on weekly cycle. Which doesn’t mean Beethoven couldn’t have worked under pressure. But he opted not to – patronage had switched from the church to wealthy individuals and secular organizations. Beethoven was no servant; he was an “artist” in a sense Bach would not have understood.

The modern construct supposes that Bach himself was divine, which on some level may or may not be true, but it’s not an idea that would have pleased him. His work was an attempt to deal with, give voice to, offer some humble explanation for, worlds beyond this one. The personalities and experiences of Beethoven and Mahler understandably became part of the story: the frustrations of a deaf composer, the terror of heart disease makes good copy. But Bach as physical, living presence was unimportant to the notes he put on the page. A cool, emotionally objectifying distance exists between Bach and his material; beauty and emotional resonance, rather like in the music of Varèse or Xenakis, is found in the high-intelligent design of structure, proportion and inner-order.

Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), a sequence of thirty variations on the bass line of an aria, written near the end of his life in 1741, has been endlessly analyzed, line by line, note by note, voice by voice, as music object, mathematical phenomenon and cultural icon. The work that haunted the eternally haunted Glenn Gould and bookended his recording career – cue Romanticized, rock-star idolatry – has also been reversed-engineered by musicologists with the plucky determination of scientists trying to whistleblow the formula for Coca-Cola. Bach’s proportional arithmetic, apparently, proves an irresistible draw. Certain features reoccur, structural markers in time. Every third variation is a canon, and each canon progressively imitates at a step further along the scale. The surrounding variations alternate between generic forms – dances, arias, a fughetta and at the mid-point a stately French Overture – and quick, freer form variations. How deeply performers need to grasp these underpinning numerical relationships is an ongoing point of discussion.

Christopher Hogwood is surprisingly phlegmatic. “What’s helpful to a student composer might not be helpful to a player,” he counters as I express some half-baked opinion that he must devote lots of time to counting bars. “You can’t play proportionally, you play what’s in front of you. In music, some mathematical things fall out by default – the Goldberg theme is in a regular number of bars, every variation is the same number of bars, and a mathematical matrix is imposed. More complicated relationships I suspect, yes, were artificial constructs. A number system is a tremendous aid to composers who don’t want to spoil the form of something; artists and architects rely on golden means and Fibonacci series calculations, and composers are no different . . . apart from in one way. Pure proportion with nothing else would be a dull piece of music. You don’t “see” a fugue in one moment, like a painting or a building; music is temporal. It’s pleasing to realize something so well proportioned that it is aesthetically a work of art. But if a piece were to overshoot the Fibonacci series by one bar I’m not certain that would worry most people.”

The jazz pianist, free improviser, composer and onetime classical organist, Oxford-based Alexander Hawkins – who earlier this year premiered a major Bach-inspired commission for jazz musicians on BBC Radio 3, One Tree Found – is clearly more entranced, perhaps even slightly spooked, by the symbolism of Bach’s numerology than Hogwood. As we sit down with the score of the Goldberg Variations, Hawkins turns human calculator. “I’ve always liked,” he reflects, “that the second book begins with a French Overture. It’s nicely perverse having an overture in the middle. And it subtly breaks the regularity of Bach’s maths. This is piece that isn’t sixty-four, or thirty-two, bars long. How long is it? With the repeats it comes out at ninety-five bars – nine plus five equals fourteen; BACH – B is two, A is one, C is three, H is eight, add those numbers together and it comes to fourteen. Bach has embedded his own musical signature into the middle of the mathematical architecture, surely no coincidence.”

By extension, Hawkins tells me, the number five (one plus four) always has significance in Bach, while the number three invariably symbolizes the holy trinity. But Hawkins and Hogwood are in agreement about a wider point: these numerical markers are buried way too deep for performers to communicate their specifics to audiences. “As a performer,” Hawkins says, “you treat the Goldberg Variations with care because you admire the craft and realize things happens for a reason. The maths works on so many levels, but at the same time, the piece wears the arithmetic very lightly. You never listen with the mathematics at the forefront of your mind.” Hogwood draws an analogy with Schoenberg’s serialism. “If it helps a performer to trace the tone rows through a piece of Schoenberg, or reach an understanding of how the maths operates in the Goldbergs then, fine, analyze away. But those relationships will not be audible, and your audience is only interested in what is audible.”

Hawkins’ One Tree Found makes you take notice, quenches your thirsty ears, via its thoughtful riffing off Bach’s palette of techniques and its refusal to go for the easy option – hello Jacques Loussier – of aping Bach’s style. Here’s a performer who has arrived at an understanding of how Bach operated by filtering his fingerprint techniques through other preoccupations. The first section of Hawkins’ piece revisits the idea of canons, but working with improvising musicians required a shift of focus.

“I’m interested in giving musicians leeway,” he elucidates. “There would have been no point in writing a canonic piece – and telling everyone in the program note, hey, my piece is about Pi – if no one could hear Pi. And I asked myself what exactly is the essential idea of a canon? The first time I felt a sense of wonder about canons was in my teens when I played the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel hoch da komm ich her (BWV 769) and realized, despite everything I’d been taught about parallel and consecutive fourths and fifths being an absolute no-no, here was Bach – Bach! – writing canons at the fourth and fifth and it sounded beautiful. The essential feature of a canon is that material occurs consecutively, out of phase. And in my piece the musicians can move through the material I give them as they wish, improvising their entries. The basic melodic modules are arranged additively (1; 1+2; 2+3+4; 3+4+5+6) and effectively you hear canons both vertically and horizontally, because your ear never quite knows where you are in the process.”

Gottfried Reiche, Bach’s trumpeter

Hawkins projects Bach into the future as a creative going concern; Hogwood tries to strip away layers of accumulated misunderstandings and outmoded ways-of-doing to reach an historically-informed view of how Bach can be played most authentically today, while a musician like the natural trumpet specialist Jonathan Freeman-Attwood has toiled at the coalfield of hard, exploratory, instrumental trial-and-error. Top of the agenda when I meet Freeman-Attwood is Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 in F Major (BWV 1047) with its fleet, chromatically devil-may-dare, trumpet writing designed with a clarino trumpeter in mind – a trumpeter who found, lipped and tongued notes without the safety net of valves or holes.

Valve technology would not evolve for another century and Freeman-Attwood continues to be pulled towards what he terms “the raw Pythagorean science” of making music through what amounts to a four-foot length of metal. “The perpetual conflict between pragmatism and idealism is a composer’s lot,” he says, “and we know that Bach regularly wrote music that was too difficult for the forces he had. At times he must have said this makes absolute sense compositionally; I am going to take this fugue to this place, knowing full well that a couple of top trebles aren’t going to be around next Sunday.”

There’s more than a suggestion, Freeman-Attwood says, that the Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 concertante group might originally have consisted of violin, recorder, oboe – and horn rather than trumpet. “The trumpet part was so high, much higher than anything else he’d written for the instrument. Bach never wrote a trumpet part in F [the pitch of the horn] in any other context. It could well have been played an octave lower during Bach’s time. Having said that, some of the concertante dialogues don’t make as much sense without the crystalline spacing of the solo quartet with the trumpet in the stratosphere.”

And the spur to write – or recycle – the Brandenburg Concerto no 2 for trumpet must have coincided with Bach encountering a top-notch clarino virtuoso? “That’s difficult to say. Trumpeters usually had some sort of municipal role, playing fanfares in court and the like, and the good ones were selected to play concert music. What is key, and actually creates the difference in sound in the second Brandenburg Concerto between the modern and old trumpet, comes down to the mouthpiece they used – a considerably larger mouthpiece than today. Their approach to articulation and strength must have been formidable because, today, if we feel a little insecure about high notes we put in a mouthpiece that is slightly shallower, which means you can hit the high notes a little bit easier. In Bach’s day trumpeters must have had something in their diet, or perhaps a special technique, because they played high notes with these huge mouthpieces. We don’t know who Bach had in mind for the second Brandenburg Concerto; but he must have had considerable chops.”

Then we dive into the score, Freeman-Attwood pointing to notes that natural trumpeters would have needed to lip down, plucking notes out of the chromatic ether. The effect, he says, of hearing a natural trumpet play the second Brandenburg Concerto rather than a piccolo trumpet – the modern day alternative – is that you hear a “clucking” rather than a “symphonic” attack. The sound is more coppery than brassy. “Bach is so ingenious that all the notes he uses are in the harmonic series. And here – look! He even dares to go into a minor key. There’s one other piece, by Biber, that has a natural trumpet play in a minor key.”

As a writer whose usual terrain is New Music and jazz, I feel strangely at home discussing a composer who pursues instruments to the very limits of their capability. As we’re wrapping up, Freeman-Attwood discusses the insolvable balance problems that inevitably exist between trumpet, oboe, violin and recorder; Christopher Hogwood goes even further. “It contains some grand music but it’s a failure; I defy you to hear the recorder part when the other three instruments are playing. It looks good on paper but, short of close miking every instrument and falsifying the balance, it’s impossible to bring off in a concert hall.”

And now that we know the world – from macrophage blood cells, to our genetic code, to fractal geometry – is constructed from systems evenly balanced between the rational and chaotic, the science and the acoustics and the intelligent design of Bach has become part of a wider argument. Published in 1979, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by the American mathematician and computer scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter refracted Bach’s techniques through the maths of Kurt Gödel and the optical illusion art of MC Escher. “Every aspect of thinking,” Hofstadter writes, “can be viewed as a high-level description of a system which, on a low level is governed by simple, even formal, rules. . . . The image is that of a formal system underlying an ‘informal system’ – a system which can make puns, discover number patterns, forget names, make awful blunders in chess and so forth.” Meanwhile, another scientist, Albert Einstein, left the world in doubt about where he stood in regards to Bach.“I feel uncomfortable listening to Beethoven. I think he is too personal, almost naked. Give me Bach, rather, and then more Bach.”

It may not be music to one’s ears when economist Jayati Ghosh speaks about the financial mess [India] is in, but it is when this professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning of Jawaharlal Nehru University raves about the economy of expression in the compositions of Bach or Beethoven.

When she is not teaching economics, lecturing, writing columns or attending meetings of the commissions of which she is a member, Ghosh is listening to music. She is tuned into BBC’s Radio 3 or Iceberg Radio, listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Or playing records of western classical music of different periods she has collected over the years.

Ghosh, who believes she has inherited her father’s passion for western classical music, is a pianist and has earned various grades of Trinity College, London. At one point, she even thought of being a professional pianist. Till four or five years ago, she practiced regularly, a habit she hopes to revive after her retirement from the university.

Even when she is not playing, Ghosh is in tune with music and has been writing and lecturing extensively on the discipline. “Music retains my sanity,” she says. Her lectures are on themes such as Mozart and love. “Listen to Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte or The Marriage of Figaro, and you will find that Mozart had a cynical view of love. The psychological complexity of the compositions, and the way he builds each musical layer, touches you. The precision is incredible,” she says.

In her younger days, Ghosh listened mostly to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, carried away by the color and the drama, but these days she gravitates towards the intellectual depth of Mozart, of Joseph Haydn and of composers such as Antonín Dvořák. “The connection to a composition is instantaneous, but to go into its depths takes years. Music is simple, yet deep, expansive and esoteric,” she says.

Jayati Ghosh started taking lessons in music at the age of seven in Washington, D. C. when her father, economist Arun Kumar Ghosh, was representing India as the Alternate Executive Director at the International Monetary Fund. A well-known Portuguese violinist was giving advanced lessons in violin across the street from where the Ghoshs lived. “My father, doting as he was, told the master I was an advanced player, whereas I could barely hold the violin. The master’s eyes dilated with horror when he first saw me, but he kept his promise to teach me. I don’t know who feared the classes more: he or I,” she recalls.

One day the master was in an especially bad mood. A close disciple of his, an ace instrumentalist, had just passed away. “On seeing me, he went into a huff, perhaps because I reminded him that he was losing his talented students and was going to have to put up with lesser musicians like me. As soon as I made an error, he snatched the violin from my hands and smashed it over my head. I ran home, crying, and began to complain bitterly to my father,” she recalls.

Ghosh says that she expected her father to sprint across the street and give the Portuguese a piece of his mind, but he did not. Instead, he was unperturbed, and with a smile he said, “Alright, now I will get you an instrument with which you cannot be attacked.”

With its hustle and bustle of international trade, its trend-setting music publishing industry and its active court and public music life, cosmopolitan eighteenth-century the Netherlands was an effervescent international hub of exciting musical creation and export.

In the middle of the century, composers in the Netherlands maintained close ties with their European colleagues, particularly those working at the highly influential and glittering court at Mannheim, Germany – the birthplace of the symphony and symphony orchestra. Leopold Mozart stated that the radiance of Mannheim “illuminated the whole of Europe.” Equally inspired by the Mannheimers’ visionary symphonic excellence, composers in the Netherlands developed their own charged-up and distinctive symphonic tradition.

The two largest centers of musical practice and endeavor in the Netherlands were the trading city of Amsterdam and the court city of The Hague. Both cities were highly cosmopolitan and internationally orientated by nature.

During the mid-eighteenth century, Dutch Stadholder William IV and his wife Anna van Hannover (also referred to in English as Anne of Orange), daughter of King George II of England, and a favorite student of Handel, took up permanent residence in the city of The Hague. The reigns of William IV and particularly of his son William V (covering the period 1747 to 1795) saw the musical life of the court city flourish. The wife of William V, Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, was the niece of Frederick the Great and was, appropriately, also actively interested in music and music-making.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, The Hague was a city of forty thousand inhabitants. It featured four opera houses, a court orchestra with regular concert series and international soloists, various formal and informal court chamber music series and events, several other public concert series and musical initiatives, pleasure gardens (with music, opera, theatre, fireworks and other entertainments), the first Dutch open-to-the-public art gallery (instigated by William V), international music publishers and leading instrument makers including Cuypers a.k.a. the “Dutch Stradivarius.”

Alongside witnessing visits from international musical superstars including the Bach student and Mozart mentor, Carl Friedrich Abel, Johann Christian Bach (“The London Bach”), Mannheim symphonist Franz Xavier Richter as well as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jan Ladislav Dussek and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, The Hague had many heavyweight composer/performers in residence at the court. The composers included the hofkapelmeesterChristian Ernst Graaf (1723–1804), the hofkapelconcertmeester Friedrich Schwindl (1737–1786), violin/viola virtuoso Carl Stamitz (1746–1801) and court cellist Francesco Zappa (1717–1803). These were composers who were all widely published and revered.

In Amsterdam, the central musical figure was Joseph Schmitt (1734–1791), also known as “The Dutch Haydn.” Schmitt was an internationally recognized composer as well as being a conductor, theorist, publisher and pedagogue, and belonged to the eighteenth-century jet set of symphonic composers, a circle which included the Bach sons and Abel. Schmitt was also the founding music director of the Netherlands’ first purpose built concert hall, the Felix Meritis, which opened its doors in 1788.

As a composer, Schmitt’s works display a highly individual voice. His musical language combines the eloquence of his teacher Abel, the drive of the Mannheimers and the Sturm und Drang of the older Bach sons. All this can be heard in his particularly rousing Symphony in E flat Major “The Hurdy Gurdy.”

As a publisher, Schmitt was responsible for introducing northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia, to the symphonic works of, among others, Mozart and Haydn for the very first time. From the offices of his publishing house in the Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam, Schmitt had a massive impact on the development of eighteenth-century musical taste and knowledge internationally. He also had a huge effect on the formation of the western musical canon and, in this way, continued in the tradition established by the earlier Dutch music publishers including Roger & Le Cène who were responsible for first introducing the world to such musical classics as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Corelli’s Concerti Grossi.

The most influential and far reaching Dutch music publishing house, however, was the firm of the Hummel Brothers started in The Hague in the 1750s. The company quickly expanded, adding offices in Amsterdam and Berlin. The Hummels produced particularly beautifully engraved editions and developed excellent international distribution. As a result, the works of the composers represented in their catalogue became Europe’s musical staple. The music published by the Hummels dominated the concert programs of court and public/private orchestras in mainland Europe, the British Isles, Scandinavia and America. The Hummels’ catalogue appealed to the voracious international audience of the time. The vocal, chamber and symphonic works of Dutch-based composers including Graaf, Schwindl, Stamitz, Schmitt and Zappa were an important part of the Hummels’ list of available works.

While composers working in eighteenth-century the Netherlands were certainly highly influenced by the Mannheimers’ musical style with its incredibly energizing, generating, enlightened, positive future vision, what is defining about the style of the Dutch symphonic school was its own open, international perspective and engagement – its cosmopolitanism. Reflecting the country’s unique political system, trading history and tradition of cultural exchange as well as the strong Dutch sense of independent individualism, the Netherlands’ eighteenth-century musical culture possessed the confidence to both reflect on and absorb from the world. From this it was able to distil and form its own musical blend, creating a wonderful, cosmopolitan musical language. And it is this cosmopolitanism which is the defining and highly appealing stylistic characteristic of the Dutch eighteenth-century symphony.

Following his 2011 production of Haydn’s The Creation, director and conductor Christoph Hagel has returned to the Berlin Cathedral during this year’s Lent and Holy Week to stage Bach’s St. John Passion (BWV 245). In addition to combining theatre with intense spiritual contemplation and contemporary dance with cinematic elements, Hagel is harnessing the spatial effect of the entire cathedral to heighten the depiction of the final days in the life of Jesus.

The St. John Passion is not opera director Hagel’s first attempt to stage Bach’s music. With his world tour of Flying Bach, he has already redefined the boundary between high culture and youth culture. This production is his attempt to make the passion of Jesus of Nazareth accessible to the entire population of twenty-first century Berlin.

Nearly one hundred performers from twelve countries are involved in the production. The large corps de ballet is responsible for the dramatic crowd scenes, while the solo dancers have been given the opportunity to represent the musical and theological content of the contemplative arias. Much of the choreography is by Buczko Martin, a solo dancer at the Berlin State Ballet, and Bach’s score is being performed by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Chorus.

The only two things missing in Bach’s music are randomness and sex. And yet in our era – so consumed with both – Bach has not lost his appeal. Bach’s ongoing star quality and his endless DNA-like capacity for mutation and adaptation are the subject of Paul Elie’s passionate and grand book [Reinventing Bach]. It is a work with a cast of thousands, circling its protagonist. I got the feeling as I read along that Bach was coursing through history like a fugal superhero. There really was no end to his capabilities: repairing organs, dispensing epiphanies, keeping pace with technological transformation, driving Glenn Gould insane, healing wounds of war, being ignored in the D.C. metro, helping Steve Jobs to release the iPad. Citizens of Gotham, look to your stereos!

At this point nobody needs to be told that Bach is good. The votes are in. But mass approval is a force to be reckoned with, and the intensity of humanity’s worship of Bach has unforeseen consequences. I propose to reverse-engineer the usual praise. Rather than using our words to measure his goodness, we can use his music as a standard to measure our ideas of the good, to assess our prejudices about virtue.

An iconic place to start is the almost-too-famous opening of the forty-eight preludes and fugues known as The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846-93). (Beethoven called this collection the Bible.) The first prelude is the foundation – let there be light! – and what you see on the page is a set of arpeggios, nothing more. For the premise of a grand project there is no grandiosity; there are only three austerities. There is no melody; each measure has the same rhythm; each measure has the same contour. In this monotonous stream of arpeggios, there is no distraction, no “surface noise,” and so we hear clearly when two notes come dissonantly close and are resolved, and we take notice when a voice leaps up, climbs, or descends in a long line: all these motions, the raw materials of musical meaning, are revealed like stage machinery that suddenly comes out from behind the scenes. The craft of voice-leading itself becomes the focus of attention and proves more riveting than the usual show.

One could go on and on with instances in which Bach, through one stratagem or another, draws our ear straight to the movement of the pitches. This element of Bach’s music – the compositional gesture directing us to “just the notes,” as if music were not just notes anyway – gets transferred into the world of Bach interpretation, into the mystique of his devotees. Here is a typical example, from a profile of the fine pianist Angela Hewitt, a Bach specialist, in The New York Times: “… the greatest compliment for Ms. Hewitt came from her father, who after listening to one of her recordings, said: ‘I didn’t hear you. I only heard Bach.’” It is a bit strange for an artist to vanish in her own profile – but this is the clichéd credo of Bach performance. You hear it all the time in Bach lessons and master classes: the student is told not to add anything of himself, to avoid the personal, to stick with the universal, to dissolve into the composer. The personal is an impurity and Bach is distilled water. Purity arrives very early in Elie’s book, on page nine: Bach is “the great exception, a site of purity in our sullied lives.” And later Elie writes a poetic passage about vanishing: “The organist is done away with. So is the church building. So are the limits of space and time, of stamina and attention. The music of Bach is all that is left….”

This is Bach as David Copperfield, making everything disappear. It is powerful and very prevalent, this desire for nothing but Bach pure, this trope of the falling away of all the specific trappings, leaving the universal essence behind. In this respect, we may compare Bach with the other father figure of “classical music”: Beethoven is great, but he is not pure. Beethoven reached toward a tortured purity in the late years, and attained a noble perfection in the middle ones (the “Archduke” Trio); but he himself never vanishes. His music seems hewn out of his will, an assertion of the individual and the artist as hero. Bach, by contrast, self-effaces. He is no hero; it is we who have made an unwilling hero out of him.

One great advantage Bach has over Beethoven is counterpoint. Late in life Beethoven obsessed over Bach, working at counterpoint and fugue feverishly – as if to purify himself, to escape from the heroic sonata forms that he had brought to their apex. In a “song without words” by Mendelssohn or a nocturne by Chopin, you usually have the opposite of counterpoint: a melody over repeated chords or a texture of arpeggios – that is, filler, something to make the chords last some time while the melody melodizes. There is a hierarchical distinction between foreground and background, between the prominent main voice and the backup band. But in “true counterpoint” no voice is the lapdog of a melody; each voice lives independently. For us humble listeners, whose lives are filled with filler, this seems like an unattainable miracle: everything counts.

Bach’s insistence on the integrity of every voice (against history, against fashion) is a second form of purity, to set beside his humility. But he is not done being pure, not by a long shot: more than any other composer, Bach represents the triumph of pure logic. He is synonymous with the fugue – the music of proposition, propagation, permutation. And the fugue was hardly the most math-like of his genres. Elie describes the discovery of the “puzzle canons,” based on the “Goldberg” bass, which musicologists scrambled to solve: music as Sudoku. One of Bach’s sons related the story that his father would hear a musical idea and would instantaneously know all the operations that could be carried out on it. Think about it – a musical idea is not a catchy tune, it is something operable; calculations can be performed on it. Like a musical-mathematical savant, Bach would then wait for these things to occur: for the idea to be played backward (retrograde), or upside down (inversion), or twice as slow (augmentation), whatever; and he was gleeful when arcane combinatorial expectations were met. It is a powerful element of the Bach aura: no matter how much you tell yourself that it’s just music, you cannot resist hearing the play of numbers, the cosmic calculus.

As a rule we don’t want music to act like Spock. We want it to let go, to make us feel, to express inward states. But Bach is a multi-tasker: his logic is unassailable but is not tedious. His proofs soar. He captures the deepest feeling while remaining perfectly logical, thereby demonstrating that those imperatives are not at all opposed. On the strength of this tremendous logic, Nicolas Slonimsky labeled Bach the “supreme arbiter and lawgiver of music,” which seems like hyperbole but isn’t. Bach is much more than a logician – he is Moses, minus Charlton Heston, handing down commandments. Bach’s laws similarly tend to come in convenient even-numbered packages: the thirty-two parts of the Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), the forty-eight Preludes and Fugues (BWV 846-93), the six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12), the six keyboard Partitas (825-30). They lay down prescriptions about harmony, about the treatment of dissonance, about design and voice-leading – musical morals that most people would never understand but can perceive through Bach’s vision.

Bach’s examples did not intimidate the whole nineteenth century, the way Beethoven’s did, but they were never questioned. We tend to glorify composers who break or stretch the laws: Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner, Stravinsky, Debussy. Bach is the exception, a composer whom we love for his rules. And having created them, he sets up shop in them, and takes inspiration from their self-evident goodness. The commandments generate freedom. Owing to this lawfulness, Bach’s choices come to feel permanent, and immune from passing style and taste; they give the illusion of being facts. All other composers seem to be writing novels, but Bach writes non-fiction.

Bach has quite a hoard of virtues. The rectitude is almost annoying: selflessness married to reason married to imagination married to lawfulness married to craft. Bach is a mirror to everything we would like to be; he is almost too good to be true, to be believed. But we believe in Bach on the evidence of the notes themselves. Having invoked fact, law, and logic, I think the larger and more precise term, the umbrella term, to sum up Bach’s mystique is truth. There is a lot of talk of truth and truthiness these days – the death of truth, a post-truth era, and a proliferation of fact checkers debasing the currency in which they pretend to trade. But in Bach’s case we are talking about a certain kind of truth, a necessary truth, even a divine truth, something unarguable. Bach allows us to deny our suspicion that music may be a tissue of lies, a sensory decadence. You cannot wander far into Bach discussion without the invocation of the divine, even in connection with his secular works: cue Beethoven’s “Well-Tempered Bible,” Lipatti’s remark that Bach was “one of the ‘chosen instruments of God himself,’” and Goethe’s observation that it is “as if the eternal harmony were communing with itself, as might have happened in God’s bosom shortly before the creation of the world.” Combine the feeling of divinity with the experience of Bach’s logic and system and you have an intoxicating combination, as if the Bible made perfect sense.

Closely following upon the invocation of God is the invocation of virtue: Bach is music’s claim to morality. Perhaps this last step is the most dangerous. It is a lot for music to bear, this conflation with truth, not to mention virtue. Arguments about Bach become proxy arguments about purity and authenticity. For some reason, people love to tell the story of Wanda Landowska saying to Pablo Casals, “You play Bach your way, and I’ll play him his way.” A memorable boast (and insult), but underneath it you can feel Bach’s truth getting carved up, subjected to territorial disputes. The certitude of Bach’s command of tones seems, like a virus, to infect some artists who play him.

It was playing of such uprightness, to put it into the moral sphere. There was such a sense of repose that had nothing to do with languor, but rather with moral rectitude in the liturgical sense.

This seems to me a bit of a word salad – what is the liturgical sense of rectitude? – but the gist is clear: Bach is to be played uprightly, ethically, correctly. And then read Rosalyn Tureck in turn: “Bach is more than music. It reveals to us, who will listen and perceive, the world to which the highest ideals of man aspire.” Even casting aside the slightly possessive and cultish “us,” think about it: Tureck is not making interpretative choices about the relations of musical tones, she is making choices about the highest ideals of man. Returning to Angela Hewitt’s Times profile, she says at one point that in Bach “there’s no room for fuss or superfluous gestures” and at another that her gowns “reflect my playing: not too frilly.” It’s not hard to read these code words: languor vs. rectitude, frilly, fuss, and so on. Out of Bach’s universal appeal, by some compensatory law, there arise insidious tendencies to moralism, severity, even Puritanical judgment.

Elie’s book is a weave of stories, emulating the play of voices in Bach’s music, and he is not shy about the moral strand: he makes connections between a devotion to Bach and a devotion to causes. The first story we encounter is Albert Schweitzer, aged and at a quandary, recording the Toccata and Fugue in D minor (BWV 565) in London in 1935:

Thirty years earlier he had renounced a life in music for one in medicine, training to run a clinic for poor people at the village of Lambaréné in the French Congo . . . . He had wanted to do “something small in the spirit of Jesus” – to make his life an argument for a way of being . . . . But his act of renunciation had turned into something else: a double life . . . . Might it not have been better to do something small the way Bach had done, hunkering down behind the organ in Leipzig . . . ?

Right away Elie hits us with music as a moral choice. He reminds us of Schweitzer’s reputation, and of its decline. Once dubbed “the greatest man in the world” by Life, he “now appears a problematic, compromised figure: his project paternalistic, his methods condescending . . . .” But, Elie suggests, the recording will endure, if all his good deeds will not: ten minutes of great playing outweigh a lifetime of virtue. Eventually Schweitzer’s story comes into contact with that of a successor, Pablo Casals:

His experience of war would shape the efforts of his later life into an extramusical role: the artist of conscience, who gives voice to human ideals in the face of diabolical powers . . . . [He] was now known for statements, not concerts . . . . [He] was the very image of moral independence – of the freedom of the individual to judge right from wrong and act accordingly.

I kept wishing that Elie would dig more deeply into the oddness of the odd couple he has brought together: the divinity of Bach and all his moral associations, and the super-secular microphone, an amoral, utterly neutral agent if ever there was one. Just as the art of recording begins to mature, and the story begins to get a bit decadent, leaving Africa (Schweitzer) and war-torn Europe (Casals) for film studios in Hollywood and Santa Barbara (Stokowski), we come across the most peculiar and famous of our heroes, an anti-divinity in his own right. I am referring, of course, to Glenn Gould. He arrives armed and dangerous, a crusader, in the wake of hearing Tureck:

I was fighting a battle in which I was never going to get a surrender flag from my teacher on the way Bach should go, but her records were the first evidence that one did not fight alone.

From this point on, a huge portion of the book is about Gould, which is, alas, inevitable. Figures such as Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim are relegated to cameos. Gould’s story is certainly powerful, and he deserves to be the hero of this tale: he re-invented Bach more radically than anyone else, with a tremendous impact on the world’s understanding of one of the world’s most over-understood composers. But it is really shocking to look back at all the Bachian virtues that we have enumerated, and then contemplate the Gould phenomenon. Against humility, logic, and reason, against Bach’s continuity, his bounded comforting cosmos, we have the fanatically crisp articulation, the humming, the pills, the social ineptitude, the extreme tempi, the ridiculous chair, the retreat into the studio, the media savvy, the anti-lyricism, the recordings made out of spite, the hands soaked in boiling water – this is the madman who became the face of Bach, the paragon of universal Bach. How could this happen? (As I get outraged about Glenn Gould, I realize that I, too, am falling into the moralistic trap.)

The easy answer to my question, of course, is Gould’s electrifying genius. But there is a second factor in Gould’s rise to domination in the interpretation of Bach: a backlash against an image. After Schweitzer, Casals, Landowska, and all their ethical seriousness, all their purity and their conscience, the thing that Bach lacked in the public imagination was the bizarre and the perverse. Gould filled the hole. Sometimes he found perversity in the music and teased it out, but mostly he just slathered it on; piece after piece, he made brilliant but deeply unintuitive, “unnatural” choices, and made them work through sheer force of will, refusing to vanish. He de-coupled logic and virtue.

So we want Bach’s music to be universal, transpersonal, a conduit to the divine, but we also want bizarre insane celebrities to play it. Perhaps we have decided as a civilization that truth is more maniacal, more partial, than it used to be? Elie claims that Gould, in recording the Goldberg Variations, “transcended himself: his isolation and awkwardness, his phobias and idiosyncrasies.” I would argue the opposite: that Gould immortalized his phobias, by grafting them onto Bach. This is not all bad. Gould’s phobias and manias immediately erase the distance of centuries; they dissolve the varnish that has piled up, and make Bach one with the anxieties of the present.

Elie’s book, almost by accident, makes you compare the save-the-world mentality of Schweitzer and Casals with the avoid-the-world mentality of Gould; and gradually the artists seem less like saints than musicians with press releases. As you read about all these icons of Bach performance, you are reminded of Bach’s propensity toward high priests and priestesses. Beethoven specialists are known as great musicians, great interpreters, whereas Bach specialists tend to be viewed vatically, as mediums. I found myself connecting Casals’s moaning and Gould’s humming – for a composer who is supposed to be pure, we sure enjoy a lot of extraneous noise! – the musical equivalent of speaking in tongues, channeling, a kind of cultish signal, a sonic signature of being on the right occult frequency to communicate with the master.

This is a big book, and as someone who struggles with the difficulty of writing about music, this reader felt a lot of empathy for the writer: how do you write about Bach for hundreds of pages without musical examples? You run across a fair number of passages such as this:

With those first long strokes of the bow, a line is being drawn, a series of ultimatums issued…. He might be singing a dirge on the battleground as the smoke clears; the music stays in place as he surveys the damage – the collapsed towers, the skeletal buildings . . .

and this:

[In] this Bach suite he slips in quietly, almost accidentally, pulling the first note out of nowhere with the bow, so that the note, a low G, goes from soft to loud from the beginning of the stroke to the end. It is a sexual entry, a lover’s deft approach. All of a sudden we are in . . .

Yes, he is describing a particular performance, not Bach’s music itself, but still these passages feel like erotica written by someone whose fetishes are different from mine. I found myself in a zone too far away, reading someone’s ideas about someone else’s ideas about Bach’s ideas, and so I sat at the piano to play, with the dubious motive of purifying myself. I started in on the opening movement of the Sonata in F minor (BWV 1018) because it has an extraordinary snuck-in entrance, like the one Elie describes, and it is a perfect example of Bach’s way with truth, logic, and musical metaphor.

The piece begins with a keyboard solo. The violin is nowhere to be found, silent for a good while: this silence is a mystery to be solved. We are in a slow triple time, and the main idea of the piece is exactly three beats long. Each time that we hear the melody, another bar has gone by, another unit of time, another moment of our lives. The keyboard plays the main idea once in the top voice, then travels lower into the middle voice – it is measuring out two units of time, pacing them out. At the same time, however, the harmony is static; we are treading water. (Music is especially hospitable to nuances and paradoxes of motion and stillness.) Then comes the crucial change-up: three bars where the harmony is allowed to move. This happens because – everything in Bach happens because! – the melodic idea continues its journey downward, and ends up in the lowest voice. It’s as if something from the sky moves underground, and shifts the foundation under your feet. Bach is all about the beauties of consequences.

Now that the melody has moved down to the bass, there is room for something new in the upper voices. But Bach doesn’t have to invent something: why would he? He fills it with the most obvious thing at hand: he extracts the first two notes of the existing melody, elongates them, enchains them. He fashions a gorgeous long melody line out of them so that they interact dissonantly – even a bit painfully, you might say – with the faster melody in the bass. Bach demonstrates a thing interacting painfully with itself.

It’s as simple as A and B: two bars of consonant stasis, then three bars of dissonant flux, in which the possibilities of the idea presented in stasis are now seen in motion. This is the kind of basic contrast, a glimpse of two kinds of musical possibility, two temporal states, that Bach is able to wring our hearts with. In fact, at the end of the three moving bars the keyboard reaches the most pained and disturbing of the dissonances. And here comes the magical elided solution to the mystery of the silence of the violin: Bach leaves this last dissonance unresolved, and just at that ambiguous moment – at the end of an unsettling motion that has not quite found a resting place – the violin at last enters, playing an unmoving held note, C. Though not a resolution, this note appears in the guise of one. It doesn’t resolve the unresolved thing; it substitutes a different solution out of nowhere.

Surreptitious, lacking in fanfare, deliberately hidden, the violin holds onto this single note for two measures, like an unblinking gaze. The sustained note has no relation to time, while the keyboard, on which every note decays, keeps marking time, seemingly unaffected. After two bars of this haunting dialectic, the violin leaves the held note to play one unremarkable measure of melody, then immediately, just as unexpectedly as it entered, returns to its earlier silence. This is Bach’s perverse, reverse masterstroke. The stage was beautifully set for nearly nothing. We are left listening to the keyboard again; time resumes. It was an ephemeral moment of eternity.

I hope it is clear from the preceding analysis how each boringly described parameter – two bars of this, then three bars of that, dissonance, enchaining – summons tremendous resonances: a resolution that comes from an utterly unexpected direction; a tension between different senses of time; the power of expectation; the linking of beauty and dissonance, of beauty and pain. The instruments themselves are imbued with symbolic identities, on two sides of a thought-divide. All these things are activated immediately, in a way that Mozart and Haydn can hardly dream of. Eight bars into the “Jupiter” Symphony, for example, Mozart has barely been able to sketch out a premise, whereas some eight bars into this humble violin and keyboard sonata Bach has already created a complex philosophical web. This difference is owed in part to the conventions of the classical style, of course, but also it has something to do with Bach’s specialness. Bach’s purity lies in this promiscuous symbolic reach, grabbing onto a million philosophical ladders at once.

Essays in Truth: in pieces such as BWV 1018, arching forms, in which the last perfect logical permutation clicks into place heartrendingly (one last contribution of the violin, a new counterpoint to the keyboard’s dissonant sequence), Bach draws a distinction between truth as compressed into aphorism (the truism, the talking point, the slogan) and truth as a practice. The sort of musical truths that Bach sketches out – unrepeatable, as no other composer ever came close to replicating these foundational experiments – are the opposite of the inspirational pronouncement. Unfolded over time, in an uncanny mix of narrative and repose, they are not intended to dazzle. They are intended to be lived in; they are well-made like a blade or a bell that rings true.

The conversion of this sort of Bachian verity into a slogan, a flag, or a school is unavoidable but unfortunate. Bach has been used as a weapon with which to attack the “Romantic,” whatever that word means: the pedal is an evil, rubato is indulgent, the piano is a monstrous anachronism, and so on. We use him as a litmus test, a way to define genuine or truthful expression. Elie’s epic makes some reference to a big battle of Bach performance practice enacted over the course of the twentieth century: a move from slow to fast. I have absorbed both ends of this partisan spectrum, from the wonderful gray-haired Blanche Moyse at Marlboro being helped up to the podium to conduct impressively slow cantatas, with the young singers gasping for air, to frenetic accounts of the Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-51) from young German bands that made me think of whizzing coffee grinders. Truth used to be something ponderous, stately, considered; now truth is play, lightness, abandon. Truth, too, is subject to fashion – which is not the same thing as Bach’s vision of truth over time.

I have to confess, this travel back and forth, from truth to slogan to doubt to reconsidered truth, is more interesting to me than Bach’s travel across technologies, and the profusion of Bach recordings. Elie places a lot of faith in recordings, and writes wonderfully about their power and their atmosphere. He suggests at one point that those who resist these new technological manifestations are attached to the past, or more precisely, to the pastness of the past. I disagree. Recordings are certainly here to stay; they are a resource, a vast library of musical thought. If I have qualms about them, it is not because I am a Luddite, but because I am attached to a ridiculously superior technology: the musical score, with all its openness, its perpetual present, its implied possibility.

A score has nothing to do with paper, or e-ink; it can appear on an iPad or on parchment. A score is at once a book and a book waiting to be written. Perhaps a golden age of music was born with the score and died with the recording. If you are listening to a recording, you are hearing someone’s truth about Bach’s truth, their idea of Bach’s truth. The wonderment is that you may hear truths you never suspected, possibilities you never dreamed – but still you are buying another person’s truth. So I say, in all seriousness, if you don’t play an instrument, take one up; take lessons; make the time. After a while, set some Bach on the music stand and play it yourself. Look at the notes on the page, envision the relationships between them. Don’t just press play. Don’t be afraid; we all live too much in fear and awe of the perfectly edited recordings around us. No matter how halting, how un-transcendent, your technique is, I promise that it may be the best Bach you will ever hear.